Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to computerized data processing and search technologies. More particularly, and without limitation, the present disclosure relates to systems and methods for analyzing failed and successful search queries, and techniques to refine future search queries.
Background
Use of the Internet has grown significantly in recent years. Internet access is now available from a variety of devices, such as personal computers, laptops, tablets, personal digital assistants (PDAs), mobile phones, smart-phones, televisions, and other devices. With the increased access to the Internet from a wide variety of devices, people have become more reliant than ever on online search engines to submit queries and find desired information.
Web sites offer a variety of different search engines for finding desired information from a large pool of available information. Both generalized search engines and specialized search engines are available. For example, Google™ and Bing™ provide web sites for conducting generalized web searches. Specialized search engines are available for searching within particular content categories. For example, search engines are available for searching for news, products, jobs, events, entertainment, legal information, medical information, geographic or map information, recipes, people, friends, real estate, and much more. There are also specialized search engines for searching for particular types of content. For example, search engines are available for searching for audio files, video files, local content, and other types of specific information or content.
There are a variety of different ways in which search engines allow users to enter queries. Some search engines provide separate fields or codes, allowing a user to designate a particular query term or phrase as relating to a particular type of information. For example, a bookseller may provide a search allowing a user to search through only book titles or author names for a particular term. Other search engines provide a field for entering a search query in a natural language format, and analyze the query in an attempt to determine the user's meaning before conducting the search. Such an analysis may involve separating the query into words, and attempting to derive a context from the ordering of the words in the query.
The prevalence of Internet access and the availability of a wide variety of online search engines make it easier for people to discover answers to their questions and find information. Nevertheless, it can still be difficult for users to find desired information. Users may misspell terms, or search for certain terms or phrases when other terms or phrases would be yield more successful results. For example, a user may search for a particular term when a synonym of that term would provide more pertinent results. As a result, a user may enter a search query only to find that the returned results do not contain the desired information. At that point, users often enter a new search query and try again. The new search query is often a refinement of the old search query. For example, a user may correct a misspelling, or replace a term with a synonym. A user often refines their search multiple times before a result set is returned that contains the desired information. This can be a tedious process given the amount of available information the user must search through on the Internet.
Certain search engines have attempted to solve this problem by providing users with suggestions if an initial search does not provide desired results. These suggestions may contain related terms generated on the basis of the initially returned result set. However, these related terms are often of little use in refining a search. Such a technique also requires a user to go through a search refinement process, which can be tedious and time consuming.